


here's my heart, what's left of it

by bettercrazythanboring



Series: in the morning i'll make you breakfast [1]
Category: Morning Glories
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Established Relationship, F/M, Future Fic, Sleepy Cuddles, Trauma, they're not TOGETHER together but also they kind of are. they just won't admit that's what they are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 15:26:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2274891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bettercrazythanboring/pseuds/bettercrazythanboring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That night, another <i>almost</i> happens; but then, their new lives are nothing but almosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here's my heart, what's left of it

**Author's Note:**

> [Title.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpkxgDpCyAc)

_And this is how it starts_ , she wants to say. To be impartial and collected; to tell the universe it happened like this and this and this, without choking on her own terror; to snort it off with a shake of her head and a, "Someone tell me why I'm still with that clown," as if this were his fault, and not the deepest fear that flashes in her mind upon request. (Before she names zombies and everyone laughs, because what could possibly have caused her to be genuinely afraid of the undead?)

But she has no idea how it starts. She never does.

There's black, and there's a scent of singed nails, and there's a sharp echo of chiming, or maybe screeching—like a sword being sharpened. It cuts through her ears, flies straight to the core of her consciousness. It slips into her nervous system, and though she cannot see it, though she cannot even really  _feel_  it, or herself, an absolute conviction crashes over her in the tides of a tempest. That her body, her soul, her very existence is shaking and convulsing. Dissolving irreparably, almost.

There's black, and then bursts of painfully bright light. They're not faces—they don't even particularly resemble shapes at all—but what might seem vague to the eye takes on a distinctive form in the mind, an instinctive knowledge, and each flash has its own personality, its own memories, its own response coaxed out of her.

None of them are friendly. None are welcome.

She could swear she screams—eventually, at some point, when her head's begun to whir and vibrate—and now all her thoughts are bleeding. It's a constant, this certainty; she cannot imagine that she'd be enough to contain this chaotic storm from bursting out of her and waking up— _deafening_ —half the world. And yet, when her eyelids pry open in a blazing instant to a darkness not quite so black, there is only silence.

It's eery, almost weightless. Almost as if all the sound has been vacuumed out of the air, and only pressure is left, pushing and prodding her skull with its relentless, invincible, inevitable fingers. Nothing comes out of her, not for seconds upon seconds upon eternities, and she cannot move, and she cannot think, and she's not sure if she's hyperventilating or not breathing at all, and the only thing that changes in this standstill scene for what might have been hours is an occasional glide of a car's headlights over the ceiling. She may not even know who she is to begin with.

He breathes, then. Or maybe she hears him breathing.  _The two should be interchangeable_ , flickers across her mind. She'd think about that, try for an epiphany that would answer this moment somehow, if only all her functions weren't focused on something more important: there's someone else in this bed.

There's someone there; right next to her. There's not supposed to be anyone there; not that she can recall. She jolts upright and scrambles to brush off remnants of the blankets she'd kicked off at some point; to scurry into the corner of this bed, away from the sleeping stranger.

Not a stranger, she realizes with a chill that spreads over her already freezing skin.

_Ike._

He lies limp here, drool trickling onto his pillow and arms splayed out, and it's almost as if he's about to pull out that gun he nearly fired at her head once. Almost as if they're about to hold knives to each other's throats in a dank basement until one of them starts bleeding. (She cannot remember who did, in the end.) Almost as if he's about to leave her for dead; like he used to, again and again and again.

He is the son of Abraham. A murderer. The faculty's lapdog. He is the reason for all this suffering, the harbinger of—

It doesn't matter if he looks different in this scarce lighting from what her memory insists he should be; doesn't matter if she cannot say how long she hasn't seen him, or how they parted ways, if they ever did at all. He's not supposed to be here, next to her, and the Academy only ever taught her one single way to get rid of nuisances, threats, and weeds.

 _If you're drowning, drink the ocean until nothing's left and walk out with toes digging into the sand_ , she'd read once after the crash, in a novel that seduced death and pulled hope out of its inky tendrils. She's drowning now, and so she lurches for the barely visible nightstand and grabs the first thing her fingers touch. Her leg swings over Ike's abdomen; her hands fly to his neck. The tip of the pencil in her hand digs into the spot next to his Adam's apple so hard a choked sound bubbles up his throat.

She presses it further and further, and adds her nails when wood alone won't do—until liquid starts spilling over her icy fingers, until the tips of them warm with his essence, however slightly. That's when his eyes fly open; he shifts, disoriented.

There's little she can see of his face in the dull glow of moonlight, but his gaze may have focused in on her. "Jade, what the fuck?" he rasps out in a slur, eyebrows drawn—whether from drowsiness or confusion, she cannot tell.

She only digs the pencil in deeper.

"Cut it out," he whines as if offended, and she almost obliges, almost takes her graphite blade to his chest and picks away at his pulsing heart. But that doesn't sound like her, not even the worst that this place ever brought out in a broken small-town girl, and in the single moment she ponders this urge, this behavior, this uncharacteristic ruthlessness in an ill-timed bout of hesitance, his arm raises.

She doesn't catch the movement in time; she  _should've_. Then she'd defend and win, because she can take care of herself; but this is too quick, and she can only brace herself in the instant that's left. He'll attack her now; he'll kill her now. She's seen what he can do, how far he's willing to go; he'll make her regret not running as soon as she awoke.

Then that half second passes, and the only thing his hand does is swat hers away from his throat like a pesky fly.

There's no real force behind it, and maybe it's because of that rather than in spite of it that her hold on him loosens. In waiting for his alarming nonviolence to give way to things that make sense, in watching him ascertain that he's not on the brink of dying from this wound, she notices that her palms are shaking. And only when his fingers wind slowly around her jerky wrists to steady them, only then does she realize the rest of her's quaking even worse.

She doesn't recoil from the contact. (She's not sure whether she  _could_ , with her lungs about to crawl up her throat, with her nails digging into the heels of her palms, but she doesn't  _try_ , and that's what scares her more than the sensation that she's about to die.)

His thumbs start rubbing her skin in soft circles. "Jade?" he tries. She's not sure what sound escapes her, but it's not pleasant. Not for either of them. "Hey, hey, Jade, look at me," he urges in a voice she cannot reconcile with the disdainful boy she knows. "Look at me. The war's over, okay?" He holds her gaze intently. "We're out; everyone's alive. No need for drastic measures," he swears.

She hisses at him.

"C'mon, babe, just try to remember where you are," he mutters, remarkably calm. "Comfy bed, art from this century on the walls, access to high-quality coffee beans  _and_  a grinder—does any of this sound like our  _delightful_  murderous worshipper castle to you?"

Her head whips around the room instinctively, searching for something, anything, but her gaze only meets darkness. She looks outside, then, to the moon peeking out from behind gray clouds; that dot in the distance might pass for an airplane, the entity nonexistent on the Academy's grounds, and a part of her whispers to take his word for it all. She chokes on some of the air she can't stop gulping.

He squeezes her hand just a bit. "No, hey, look, I get it; you can't comprehend how you landed a stud like me," he says with half a smirk she, at last, recognizes. "But I can assure you you  _did_ , and lemme tell you right now, the sex is  _amazing_."

Something about the way he says it—with such assurance and certainty—makes her shakes slow, her breathing soften. His fingers keep drawing patterns on the backs of her hands, still resting on his chest. "I was as surprised as you are," he whispers and shifts so that more of him is visible in the silver glint from the window. Dark circles grace his eyes; some of his skin has folded into wrinkles that weren't there before; his nose crooks right below the bridge now.

And this is how it all comes back.

All the tears, all the pain, all the shit everyone went through. All the victories, all the graves, all the goodbyes. "I—"is all she can manage at the memory of Daramount's mangled body. At the breakdown she'd had the first time she stepped back on the same solid ground the rest of the world called its home. At the first night in this apartment, when she'd stayed up all night playing board games and eating ice cream with Ike in the measly light of two flashlights. "N-No—  _Shit_ —"

Her body stills completely and, moments later, slumps forward in a kind of trance.

It's not jarring when his arms catch her and guide her down to his side; not even surprising. She doesn't register it at all at first, in fact; what use is there in noticing something self-evident—something she hasn't thought to question since the day, long ago, when they sat bruised and battered in a dirty cave, listening to the rain muffle the shouts of their pursuers, and told each other everything there was to tell?

He holds her tenderly now, as if afraid of breaking her. A hand moves to the back of her head, and he whispers, "C'mere," again and again; even after she's pressed as close as physics will allow, even after he takes the blanket she'd kicked off and wraps her into it like a burrito. "C'mere," he says in a voice softer than feathers, and she does.

Jade burrows into him and drinks in the air, and somewhere in between the shaking she must have started sobbing, for he wipes her cheeks with gentle fingers now. "It's okay, you're okay, we're okay," he mutters, fingers deep into her hair. Her eyes slam shut; her fingers fist at his collar. Her breath comes out broken at his shoulder.

" _I didn't— I didn't—_ " she tries, but the words drown in tears that spill quietly now.

He presses lips to the side of her head. "It's okay. I'm okay. Shh."

She leans into his touch, as she's done a dozen times on nights like these. He has curled into her like a kitten on almost as many—not that they're keeping track. Not that they even could, with the nights one of them screams to the point of hoarseness; with the nights the bed is empty altogether because the moon looks a lot like a spinning cylinder sometimes; with the nights they almost succeed in killing  _themselves_  instead of each other.

So many nights.

"D-Don't let g-go," she pleads against his neck. His arms tighten around her, as if offended she would even suggest otherwise, and he starts humming some melody she liked as a child.

They've got it down to a fine art, almost; soon he'll start rocking her and casually recounting adventures in strolling down Wall Street—ridiculous enough to distract, not too loud to be background. And she'll be lulled to a welcoming black by his voice. And the last thing she'll register before shutting off, is his indignance at being so  _boring, apparently, Jade._  And his hold won't loosen for an hour—until her cheeks have dried and her fingers have warmed, and her heart has slowed—and there'll be no more dreams tonight, she knows.

And they'll never admit that amid the sex and this curious underlying affection neither makes a habit of voicing, amid the  _convenience_  of having someone around who already knows all their secrets… They're together—or, rather,  _still_  together—to look out for each other.

 _Someone_  should. (Someone that wouldn't be traumatized for life, or worse, when this is just another Tuesday for them.)

But for now she tries to breathe; to be grateful that she can kind of remember what she had for breakfast this morning or how Ike stuck chopsticks up his nose last week while he thought she wasn't looking; to remember going back home to Jimmy and Dad after it all ended—because surely a memory that painful has to be her own, not the result of a brainwash she's habitually shedding. (They fixed so much of the universe together; why not their families? Why not their lives?)

She's still now. He's quiet, probably gauging her lucidity or trying to remember another tune. She has just enough strength for one impulsive decision she'll regret in the morning, and so she draws back and tugs her head up, and presses a small kiss to the hard edge of his jaw.

"Shh," he soothes, so low she's not quite certain she even hears. Car lights still flicker on the ceiling, and it's been  _months_  now since she's had to schedule an emergency visit to her therapist, and sleeping together is something they may never give up, no matter how many scars their nightmares leave in the morning.

Because—and this isn't the only reason, but it's a damn good one—this moment after the shock and alarm and danger have all dissipated, this moment in Ike's arms on the brink of unconsciousness after coming so close to killing him... It's always the safest she's felt in nearly a decade. Since Mom died, since before she'd even enrolled. She hasn't found peace like this anywhere else. It's fucked up, she knows, but it's the truth, and maybe that's why it keeps happening. (Or maybe the two of them can simply never stop trying to get in the last word, even in this; they take turns, so how long before she wakes up with his hands around  _her_  neck again?)

His breath doesn't shallow, not like hers does, and she wants to apologize for waking him, for causing all this the week before his big merger, but her lips won't move anymore. There's only darkness now, a familiar and almost pleasant friend this time, coated by the cologne he must have deemed weak enough at the end of the day to avoid washing off.

She lets out an parting hum. He squeezes her fingers. And this is how it ends.

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her hair is pulled taut. That's the first conscious thought she has. Not a thought even; merely an awareness of life's realities. The vast space has no actual color. Skin hurts if you touch a burning pan. Some of her hair's stuck in Ike's armpit and if she moves her head an inch, needles will start pricking her skull.

The second thing she notices is that his right arm still holds her. Not possessively; not even casually. Just another simple fact of life. It curves around her head—still tucked against his side, lower now, nose almost burrowing in the space between his ribs—and ends with his fingers on her right shoulder, on her upper arm, warming and soothing her in ways she doubts he even notices.

Her arm's slung around his stomach; that's the third thing. Feels so natural, it doesn't even register that she's known it for many, many seconds—the way you'd hum a long-forgotten song in your head several times in full before realizing you were thinking of anything at all. The limb rises and falls slowly along with his breath, and she can never quite get over the sensation of the soft morning sun reaching their bed in the hard bars granted to it by half-raised blinds. The faintest scent of freshly baked bread from somewhere outside glides over the room.

She inhales; once, twice. Deeply.

It almost seems like a perfect morning. And that's the kicker, then, isn't it? No such thing as  _perfect_  around here. "You awake?" she whispers against his chest without opening her eyes.

"Nope," he mutters in that way he does, without prying his own lips apart, so that the sounds burst out in little bubbles.

The circles she hadn't noticed his thumb was making on her biceps promptly widen and quicken. Her own fingers start ghosting over his abdomen, curiously bare despite the shirt she knows was there a few hours ago. "What time is it?" Her hand travels upward;  _ah_ , there it is, riding halfway up his ribs.

"Why; you worried we slept through our alarms, or that there's more awful, unwanted z's to be had before they go off?" His tone borders on the scathing, but there's a genuine question somewhere underneath. She reaches her lips out to smooch his skin as an answer.  _Yes, she slept fine. No, she's not gonna claw his stomach open. Thanks for worrying, Ike._

"Just trying to figure out my place in the world again," she says.

He yawns and shifts with a small grunt, his other hand settling atop hers on his abs. "And you think  _time_  is the way to do that? I think you messed up your dimensions there, sweetie." Her fingers wind through his.

"Well, you know; space and time are inseparable, and all that junk," she says, cracking one eye open. The cold, hard bordeaux of the walls is dulled by the fuzzy orange of rising sunlight; their lace curtains flutter in the wind of recently washed air; Ike's neck has cut on it, and some blood seems to have pooled between his collarbones to dry. "I tried to kill you last night." It's not a question.

" _Yes_ , you did," and this isn't an accusation. He almost seems amused when his eyes, aided by great effort, open as well. "What about it?"

Her mouth gathers up in a sheepish grimace; she lifts her head and rests her chin on his pecs to look up at him. "Sorry."

It's a remarkably bare sentiment—even for them, though sometimes these things end with no sentiments at all—but she nevertheless thinks she sees his lips quirk infinitesimally before their warmth fades in favor of impishness. "Well, I gotta say, Jade, I think we both know how apologies are made in this household, and it's not with words." His hand brushes the back of her head.

If she had any shame left, she'd fill with it over how long it takes for the words to click. Her eyebrows tighten. "What, like, right now?"

"Why not?" He shrugs. "No better way to wake up and we've still got—" his neck cranes to the other side "—oh, god, fuck, another twenty  _whole_  minutes before the ding ding dings start." His head plops back into the pillows with a groan. "I didn't get a lot of sleep, I hope you know."

Considering the offer, she lifts herself half-upright, scowling against the sunlight, and stretches her shoulders, cracks her neck. He stays exactly where he was—flat against the mattress, head barely moving even to follow her, eyes sunken so deep into his skull that they must be in cahoots with an anchor. "I haven't brushed my teeth," she says at last, grimacing, though the words are far from certain. "And I'm pretty sure I'm covered in a layer of dried cold sweat. I'm  _gross_." After a beat, she adds, "You're gross, too. With the..." She points to the blood all over his neck; winces at her own reddish brown fingertip. "No offense."

"Shower sex, then," he offers, ever flexible. When she says nothing, he rolls to his side like a clump of play-doh, head propped up by a hand against his ear, and watches her from underneath half-hooded lids. "Let me guess what's happening right now." His eyes are squinted, tone sly. "You're trying to remember the last time we had one of those.  _'Was it good? Would it be worth it?'_  you ask yourself," he says with his best attempt at a sensual voice; it fails miserably. "Ah, that's right, it  _was_  good," he drawls when her expression softens just so. "Yeah, yeah, there was that thing your buddy Ike did with his hands. Shame you can only do that in a shower."

An undefined chuckle escapes her as she combs fingers through her fiery hair and gathers it back; forgetting, as always, where she's put her band.

"So now that the venue's been deemed flawless," he continues with a shameless grin, "other concerns are surfacing. 'Are you feeling it? Did all that attempted homicide kill your libido for the week? Are you gonna regret it all day if you pass up this prime opportunity?'" His voice lowers—mockingly so. "'Can you get hot and bothered enough in those twenty, thirty minutes to get off harder with me than you could alone on your lunch break, if you wanted?'"

"Practical questions, all of them," she agrees, ignoring the tug in her belly. "And what, o great narrator, might be the answer?"

" _Duh_ ," he says, one arm raised. "You're horny and I'm a gift of the gods. Same as the answer roughly  _one hundred percent_  of the rest of the time." He nudges her with his knee, wets his lips. "Hey, more questions: 'do you want my lips on your ear? Do you want my tongue to use your body as a painting canvas? Starting, oh, I don't know,  _here_ —" he drags a single fingertip over the inside of her knee "— or maybe here—" he tickles her toes with his own "—and up your side, to wherever you command me next?'" Because she always does, and he always carries out her every wish, no matter how impossible. "And ending with me drawing pretend dicks over your clit, of course," he adds, "because  _come on_."

She hopes this is the one time arousal won't make her visibly blush. (She can tell from the victory edge in his voice that it's not.)

"Or maybe it's my  _fingers_  you're craving today," he says, smirk downright palpable. "Or maybe you want it quick and dirty—figuratively speaking, as the purpose of the shower is, in fact, cleanliness," he adds. "Regardless, my psychic narration skills lead me to believe we're now past the point of  _whether_  you want me right now, and onto  _how_  you want me."

She can't help but give only an, "Eh," even as she cycles through her mental database of all the surprisingly creative ways he's ever driven her wild—for exactly the reason he'd said.

Ike raises one dubious eyebrow at her shrug. "Because while you were busy doing all that _wondering_ and _evaluating_ ," he continues pointedly, finger raised, "a tingle trickled down to your nethers, and it's now  _relentlessly_  demanding attention. Like a newborn child." His gaze wanders away. "Needy little things, babies and genitals," he muses.

Jade makes a face. "I thought you were supposed to be trying to turn me on."

"Oh, I was," he says easily. "But I'm pretty sure that job got done the moment I said 'shower sex', and the rest was purely for my own benefit." He hooks hands behind his head, all smug, and, dammit, he's  _right_. "Now I'm just waiting for you to wise up and realize how unhealthy repressing desires is, and all that gunk. Not that you were ever going to, I mean; we've established that you're horny," he adds, and then proceeds to have the longest yawn in the history of the world. She always forgets some of his molars are crooked. With a melodic sigh, he rubs moisture from his eyes and continues, "Besides, I'm told sex leads to babies. A cycle of neediness is what it is." He makes a sound with his teeth. "But then, isn't all life,  _really_?"

Her head falls into her open palms. "I can't believe I'm planning the rest of my life with you."

"It's not promising to be a very long one, if that's of any consolation," he says, barely stifling a laugh.

He yelps from the pillow she halfheartedly hurls at his face. "You. Me. Bathroom. Five minutes," she declares and lowers one foot to the floor behind her, nearly losing her balance. "Before you talk me into changing my mind."

Ike nods easily. "I can swing that."

"You had better be ready to rock my world, though, 'cause I  _really_  don't have time to watch you take a leak today," she says and starts stretching for real, reaching up to the ceiling and down to her ankles. Her joints crack something fierce.

"Oh,  _that_  you can't spare two seconds for, but  _murder_  fits nicely into your schedule?"

She pauses with one arm extended beyond the other shoulder to stick her tongue out at him, then stumbles to the bathroom with a yawn. "Grab food if you need it," the woman calls over her shoulder as she disappears beyond the doorway, before reconsidering and popping her head back out. "I'm  _serious_. You're not allowed to collapse on me, got it? I think there's some granola bars in the pantry."

"Yeah, yeah." He waves her away. "Stop fussing."

And with an eyeroll, Jade patters back over the glossy, beige tiles to the sink. She's long since stopped looking in the mirror first thing after waking up—is her face okay, will boys like it, can she show her unruly hair in public, should she put on makeup if she's gonna have morning sex—and now goes straight to the cold water for her first dose of alertness. It's normally followed by a momentarily blinding shot of the sun as soon as she enters the living room, and then by coffee—and then, by the time Ike gets up to some shenanigans or other at breakfast, she's perfectly awake.

She only checks her reflection to see whether any blood got onto her face during the night; that's it. (And while it may have helped a teeny tiny bit at first, this confidence to be her unadorned self in the most primal of situations has absolutely nothing to do with how Ike likes her hair best chaotic and untamed.)

And  _yet_  there's something to be said about wiping off drool marks to _really_ feel one's own sexiness.

She discards of her T-shirt entirely, because he's  _gonna_  take it off anyway and she  _might as well_  not stink while he does, and then struts back into their bedroom wearing only the daisy duke pajama bottoms with "BABE" printed on the back that he once got her as a gag gift. But instead of ramming into the guy when their paths cross about three inches out the doorway—the _reasonable_ thing to expect—she finds him slack-jawed and spread-eagle on his stomach in the sheets instead.

He looks so peaceful, for someone so worn-out; it's involuntary when the heat he makes a habit of igniting within Jade shifts from burning her core to warming her chest as she watches. The lightest of snores escape him exactly six times before she sighs, tiptoes to his side of the bed, and turns off all four of his alarms, one by one.

"Useless," she mutters before pressing a gentle kiss to the top of his cheek; she holds her lips there for longer than she'd ever admit under oath, and runs her fingers through his hair, once, before heading to the kitchen to email his boss—or babysitter, she's not quite sure—a sensible-sounding excuse to work from home today. (The vast duration of which he had  _better_  spend catching up on the sleep that's been eluding him for months now.)

Excuses are easy. Infusing the letter with just enough unprofessionalism to actually  _pass_  for the bastard? Ugh, thank god for coffee.

**Author's Note:**

> It happened like this:
> 
> I read [life is a maze and love is a riddle](http://blevins.livejournal.com/29194.html?thread=580362#t580362), the insanely cute Jade/Ike post-series domestic drabble. Then, of course, I thought to myself, "what would the _sex life_ of [different] post-series domestic Jade/Ike be like?" I resisted the thought, but the thought won, and from it [half-written untitled smut that at the time of this posting boasts 7000+ words and raving reviews about snippets shared with perv friends] was born. And, OF COURSE, because I am otp trash, I infused the smut with too much worldbuilding and relationship dynamics that have no place among graphic descriptions of private body parts, and they kiiiinda broke free—out of the document entirely.
> 
> I had to be a good host and give them a proper home; you guys understand. So, voilà! Horror cuddles. (Which I am fairly certain were unconsciously at least _slightly_ inspired by [my future isn't bright](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1073198).)


End file.
